Annotating and Victorian England: Unlikely Bedfellows

My freshmen and I have started The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde. My main goal for our study is to work with students on thoughtful annotations. So many students underline everything or nothing as they read, and I remember feeling as a student that I was never sure I was marking the "right" things. So, the students' "test" on this play will be a master copy of the play itself -- one with all of their annotations. Here is the assignment sheet:

Your Master Copy of The Importance of Being Earnest

Annotating a text is one of the most important skills to have to study literature. Authors do it to their own writing to make notes for themselves, directors do it when they are preparing a play for their actors, and scholars do it when they are studying a text for their dissertations. So, now you will take on the role of author, director, and scholar and create your own master copy of The Importance of Being Earnest.

The Assignment: Fully annotate your copy of the play to show the depth of your understanding of the text itself as well as of the historical context of the text.

The Method: You will use the technical annotation skills available on your laptop. Let’s review how to do each of these: colored fonts, highlighting, hyperlinks within the document as well as to the Internet, and comments. The most important thing to remember is that for every highlighted passage, you must have an explanatory comment.

The Guidelines: To help me read your annotations, please use the corresponding colors to highlight the text to indicate which item you are doing.

1. At least 5 explanations* of how your knowledge of the historical background of Victorian England explains an aspect in the text

* 3 of these examples must be hyperlinked to corresponding websites as well as commented on.

2. At least 3 explanations of Wilde’s jokes about society

3. At least 5 explanations of aspects of the play discussed in class (not including the next question)

4. An explanation of the meaning of the title to the play as a whole

5. An explanation of your favorite part of the play (that is, explain what is happening and why you like this part so much)

Total: at least 15 annotated passages throughout the play

My school is in the midst of a year-long professional development focus on Understanding By Design. My personal goal is to review my assessments with an eye for truly asking students to DO what I hope they have learned. This assignment is one of my efforts at that. It seems to be working so far -- on our first day of reading, the students were making historical connections because they got the humor (here is a great site for research on Victorian England -- we used this before beginning the play). Tomorrow's homework will be for them to complete their first official annotation. Here is an example:

LADY BRACKNELL. [Pencil and note-book in hand.] I feel bound to tell you that you are not down on my list of
eligible young men, although I have the same list as the dear Duchess of Bolton has. We work together, in fact.
However, I am quite ready to enter your name, should your answers be what a really affectionate mother requires.
Do you smoke? SLN1

SLN1The mothers kept a list of all the eligible men that can marry there daughters. They ask questions to find out what the men are like.

For the next step, students will go live with their annotations using Diigo. Wish them luck!

Literature Circles

I have used literature circles for many years. My students always enjoy them, and I get better each time with setting up the process so they truly engage with their books. I particularly enjoy doing this with my ninth graders when I have them write their own tests as a group. I was given the opportunity in college to write a final for a class rather than take one. I was petitioning to take my final early, and the professor offered me this instead. As I wrote that final, I realized how smart the professor was about assessments. I had to really know my stuff in order to create a final I thought he would deem worthy -- the writing of the test probably took me longer than the hours I would have been in the exam room taking his final. It was a powerful lesson for me, and my ninth graders have benefited from it. They are always amazed when I tell them they will write their own tests. The discussions the groups end up having as they decide which questions to ask are always the best of the whole lit circle process. I know they know their stuff when I see strong tests.

This summer I had another chance to really learn something by doing it. A colleague of mine set up an online literature circle in our school's ning to work through the first five chapters of Understanding by Design, our assigned faculty summer reading. I was glad to have a structure set for me because I knew that meant I would get the reading done, so I signed on. Well, if you have any doubts about the efficacy and power of the literature circle process, banish them now. As I worked through a lit circle role for each chapter, I saw the beauty of the lit circle pedagogy in action. It is reading strategies come alive -- when I read a chapter knowing I was, say, the connector, I read specifically for that goal. I ended up remembering far more with this focus than I ever do just reading something to read. I had a scaffolding to pin my reading on and to give me a road map through what is some dense reading a times (trust me on this one if you have not read UbD). I also knew I did not have to worry about every detail because I had my lit circle partners focusing on the other aspects. I knew I would learn from them, so I could learn at this first stage better because I was more focused. Then the discussions we had helped me pull everything together -- I looked back at the book, I remembered things I had forgotten, I learned things I had never thought about ...

While I knew in my mind that literature circles were a good thing, to participate in one gave me so much more insight into why they work so well. Once again, I am reminded that DOING something is the most powerful way to learn. A great reminder particularly as I begin a new year with my students ... can I get them to DO more in their learning?

How to Make a Better Exam

Our divisions heads have asked us as departments to discuss our semester and final exams with the goals of ensuring that they are truly testing the students on what we hope they learned and that they are worthy of their 20% weight into the semester grade. Our exams are two hours long, and we have the option of using the laptops or not -- although Internet access is not available in our testing site.

While I know there will be many thoughts out there about the worth of such exams and whether they should have such weight, that is not something our school is open to pursuing right now. Instead, I would love to know the BEST exam or part of an exam you ever gave. Also, what have you done to have your exam be skill-centered rather than content-centered? Maybe between us all, we can create the perfect exam that is worthwhile and challenging for whatever school, like mine, is committed to having exams.

I'll start: a colleague and I crafted a section on the British Literature exam where the students wrote about what they learned from their classmates' wiki postings on the novel Regeneration. I thought it was so effective because it forced them to read new ideas and to collaborate. They got to pick any two of the wiki entries to read and learn, so they had choice, but whatever they chose, they were validating their classmates' work and learning more about the novel.